A Testament to the Vitality of California's Tribes / Guidebook covers 143 groups without romanticizing their struggles or triumphs

NATIVE CALIFORNIA GUIDE

For readers who think of American Indian culture in California as something that died out with Ishi in 1916, the "Native California Guide" is a testament to how alive and diverse the state's indigenous peoples are. The book's survey of 143 present-day Indian communities emphasizes the renaissance within these cultures without romanticizing their struggles to survive in an oppressive system. As author Dolan H. Eargle Jr. claims at the beginning, "Adversity was what California's native peoples received; persistence of their cultures is what they offer the world."

"Native California Guide" is a revision and expansion of two earlier books by Eargle, "The Earth Is Our Mother" and "California Indian Country." For this edition, Eargle not only wrote the text but also provided most of the book's photographs and poems. During the last two decades Eargle has visited reservations, interviewed tribal leaders, researched American Indian historical sites and attended powwows and other cultural events. His long acquaintance with Indian life in California is reflected in the guide's easygoing narrative style, peppered with first-person anecdotes.

Arranged as four "books," the guide begins with a short introduction to the prehistory, geography, art and ecology of Indian peoples within the area that became the state of California in 1850. The artificial boundary of a state line inhibits Eargle from discussing certain larger patterns of American Indian cultures, such as the First Salmon Ceremony, an important ritual not just for California's coastal Indians but for Pacific Coast tribes to the north as well.

But the state boundary does allow Eargle to demonstrate how California's history begins as Indian. He explains how, during the past two centuries, the indigenous in California have been tricked, poisoned, chased, imprisoned, hanged, shot and removed from their ancestral lands, often never to return. Beginning with the arrival of Junipero Serra, who erected the first mission in 1769, Indians were forced into slavery, then killed if they tried to escape. In one particularly brutal incident in 1837, a man named Jose Maria Amador went out on a "recapturing" expedition:

"He found 200 Indians, half of them already baptized. His party marched the Christians down a road, murdering each with four arrows. With the others, he poured a bottle of water on their heads in a mock baptism, then shot them in the back. Amador city and county are named after this man's family."

As Eargle notes, Amador is not the only assassin whose name adorns California maps. Men such as Gaspar de Portola, Mariano Vallejo, Peter Lassen and John Fremont all contributed directly to the demise of hundreds of American Indians. Eargle proposes renaming some places bearing these men's names with older, indigenous names

In the second and third "books," which discuss present-day tribes throughout the state, Eargle often allows tribal leaders to tell their tribes' own history. The result is a fresh view of tribal life rather than dusty academic jargon.

Marvin Brown, for example, recounts how his E'lem colony of the southeastern Pomo tribe incurred years of exploitation at its ancestral village on Clear Lake, perhaps one of the oldest continuously inhabited Indian sites on the continent:

"First, Chinese workers for the Borax Company came to take borax and sulfur in the 1860s. . . . Next came the American mining company in the 1880s to get mercury from the mine. . . . They mined . . . well into the 1950s, leaving a 417-foot hole and putting piles of mercury tailings alongside our village like small bare mountains, and pumping toxic waste directly into the lake. Then came the geothermal well drillers in the late 1960s, drilling holes down to 5, 317 feet deep. But the steam was too wet to use. . . .

"When the government told them to clean it up after the companies closed down, they went bankrupt, leaving us with this huge hole with a toxic mess at the bottom, which they now know is leaking into the lake. . . . The EPA came, looked, and declared it a Superfund site, but there is always a holdup of one sort or another. They've been 'studying' it for 20 years."

In contrast, tales of economic recovery and cultural rebirth abound in the guide, and the appendixes, which list museums, pueblos, casinos and art shows, illustrate how California's tribes are preserving their culture and pioneering new traditions.

Bursting with information, " Guide" nonetheless has its problems. The text is rife with typographical and grammatical errors, and its organization and layout fall short of making it a user-friendly reference. Perhaps future editions will correct these problems, in which case the guide would serve well for high school and college groups, or for the lay reader who wishes to become better acquainted with contemporary American Indian life.